I’ve been teaching literature for close to 40 years, and I’ve seen a lot of changes over that time. Although I’m not quite old enough to have earned a Purple Ditto-Ink Heart for my service, I am nostalgic for the Before Times when people had to read and think for themselves. Like many teachers, I’ve been battling against AI’s consumption of my students’ creativity and critical thinking. But whenever I start to despair, I remind myself that machines are terrible fiction readers. You can’t experience what Stephen King calls the “portable magic” of a book—the communion between a writer’s imagination and your own—without bringing your unique personal history, full of passions and scars and lived experience, to the act of reading. They don’t call it the humanities for nothing.
When I set out to research what would become Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear With Stephen King, I understood this on an intellectual level. But I had no idea that I’d come to feel it in my bones—or, to use a King neologism, in my “fearbone,” which he claims resides in a different place for each of us.
In 2017, I moved my family from Boston to become the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at King’s alma mater, the University of Maine. I assumed I’d never have contact with him, so I was shocked when he called me at home four years into my position. After a few meetings (including a magical visit from him with my students), it was clear that the Master of Horror was a huge mensch. Although I was still nervous around him, I got comfortable enough to ask him and his wife, Tabitha, if I could spend my upcoming sabbatical year in their personal archive, which had just been collected and attached to their home in Bangor. I wanted to read the early drafts of his manuscripts from the 1970s, which include his handwritten margin comments and edits. The couple graciously granted me unprecedented access to this treasure trove of his most iconic works.
Unlike machines, we each have a secret storage room of fears, spawned from our own histories.
My goal was to understand why some of King’s monsters had been living in my head since I was 12. That’s when I first encountered his writing and met the Boogeyman, a creature from his 1978 collection, Night Shift. Many others followed: The Shining’s rotting woman in the bathtub of Room 217, ’Salem’s Lot’s vampires, Pet Sematary’s unearthed undead. If I could track how King crafted these monstrosities, I thought, then maybe I could release some of the hold they still had over me.
Exhibit A was the Boogeyman, which had spawned my still-present fear of sleeping near an open closet. In the story, Lester Billings is confessing to his new psychiatrist that all three of his small children had been killed in their cribs, one by one over the past five years, by a monster lurking in their bedroom closets. By the time the youngest child, Andy, is born, Lester finally believes that the Boogeyman is real, and if he wants to save himself, he’ll need to turn his little son into a decoy. His wife, Rita, is out of town when he makes this fatal, cowardly move.
Of all the children’s deaths, Andy’s hit my fearbone most acutely: I had been an extremely shy child who stuck close to my mom’s side and avoided going to unknown places whenever possible. Mom + Home equaled Safety in my little-girl mind. Rita’s absence and Andy’s murder in his own bedroom exploded all of my anxious calculations.
But it wasn’t just the horrifying plot that had stuck with me over the years; it was the specific words King had used to convey it. I’d never forgotten the monster’s scarecrow head chomping at its toddler prey like a terrier “shaking a hunk of hair.” Or its reappearance at the end of the story as it “shambled out” of the psychiatrist’s closet with the doctor’s mask in its “rotted, spade-claw hand.”
Read our starred review of ‘Monsters in the Archives’ by Caroline Bicks.
One of the many discoveries I made during the year I spent reading King’s manuscripts was that the Boogeyman looked different in his first draft. Holding the original typed page and seeing it for myself didn’t take away the horror of his final version, but it did help me appreciate how King had crafted it. And it emboldened me to ask him questions about what he was thinking at the age of 25 when he started imagining this monster. At first, he seemed to brush the question off with a pragmatic response: He wrote the story because he needed the money. He sold an early version of it to Cavalier Magazine in March 1973, when he and Tabitha had two children under the age of 3. But then, after a bit of careful prodding on my part, he told me that he has always been in touch with his fears, and that, with two small children, he was worried about crib death. By the time he was revising the story for Night Shift, I noted, he had a third child to worry about.
Turns out, we were feeling his story from two different points on the same human timeline: vulnerable kid and scared parent.
Discovering how the Boogeyman evolved with King’s own fears while revisiting my own was a profound experience, one of many that Monsters in the Archives chronicles. Archives is plural in my title for a reason: Unlike machines, we each have a secret storage room of fears, spawned from our own histories. When one of us writes a great story, and one of us reads it, the doors to those rooms swing open, and we meet in a communal imaginative space. That’s where our monsters come together for a little while, rattling our fearbones in a shambling dance.
Photo of Caroline Bicks © Leah Ramuglia